The Nazis murdered around six million Jews. They also murdered millions of other people. The pages in this section cover the non-Jewish victims of the regime: the political prisoners and trade unionists who filled the first concentration camps in 1933; the Soviet prisoners of war, of whom more than three million died in German captivity, mostly through deliberate starvation in the open-air camps of 1941, 1942; the Roma and Sinti of Europe, of whom hundreds of thousands were killed in what Roma call the Porajmos; the homosexual men marked with the pink triangle in the camps; the Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused on religious grounds to take the oath of allegiance to the Reich; the disabled adults and children who were the first to be killed by the regime under the T4 programme; the Polish civilians who lost between two and two and a half million lives outside the Holocaust through execution, starvation and forced labour; and the various smaller groups, the Black Germans, the Afrodeutsche; the Slavic civilians of Belorussia and Ukraine; the Spanish Republican refugees; the Czech and Yugoslav resistance prisoners, who were caught up in the same machinery of killing.
The relationship between the Holocaust and these other crimes is the subject of an old argument. The case for treating the Holocaust as a separate crime is that the murder of the Jews was the only one of the Reich’s killing programmes that was driven by a settled, total, racial-eliminationist ideology and that was carried out across the continent without exception or qualification. The case for treating the killings together is that the same machinery, the same camps, the same SS personnel, the same trains, the same rationalisations did the work in every case, and that the people who died at Hadamar, at Sachsenhausen, at the Babi Yar pits with their Roma neighbours, in the Wehrmacht’s Soviet POW cages, are owed the same accounting as the people who died at Auschwitz. This site treats the Holocaust as a separate and primary topic and the other killings as adjacent and connected. The pages in this section give each group its own treatment.
What is here
Each group covered in this section has its own page describing who they were, why they were targeted, what happened to them, and where the documentary record stands. The major groups have full-length treatments. The smaller groups are covered more briefly, with reading lists for further work. The relationships between the groups, the political prisoners and the homosexual men in the same Sachsenhausen barracks, the T4 staff later transferred to Belżec to gas Jews, the Roma deported alongside the Jews from the same Hungarian transit camps in 1944, are noted where they are documented and are part of the larger story.
The numbers, briefly
The numbers across the non-Jewish victims of the regime are approximate and disputed. The standard estimates are: Soviet prisoners of war, around three million two hundred thousand killed; Polish non-Jewish civilians, between two million and two and a half million; Roma and Sinti, between two hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand; T4 disabled victims and the wartime continuation of the killing programme, around two hundred and seventy thousand; Soviet civilians killed outside the POW programme, several million; political prisoners across the camp system, around two hundred thousand non-Jewish dead; Jehovah’s Witnesses, around fifteen hundred dead; homosexual men, between five thousand and fifteen thousand dead. The figures overlap and the records are incomplete. The total of non-Jewish dead at the hands of the regime, leaving aside the Jewish six million, is between ten and fifteen million people.
See also
- People with Disabilities and the T4 Programme
- Homosexual Men
- Political Prisoners
- Roma and Sinti
- Jehovahs Witnesses
- Soviet Prisoners of War
- Polish Victims
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Yisrael Gutman, ed, The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vols, Macmillan, 1995